The Untold Story Of Emmett Louis Till

Every purchase you make through these Amazon links supports DVD Verdict's reviewing efforts. Thank you!

All Rise...

Judge Ryan Keefer first encountered this film at a festival whose main theme was injustice. Truer words could not have been said.

The Charge

The Civil Rights Movement didn't just start with Martin Luther King Jr. or
Rosa Parks. It started with Emmett Till.

The Case

For those unfamiliar with the story of Emmett Till, here are the events
surrounding the story: Emmett Till is sent by his mother to live with his
extended family in Mississippi. Till receives some friendly words of warning
about segregation in the South, along with the things to do and not to do or say
when down there. In a country store in Money, Mississippi, he whistles at a
white woman named Carolyn Bryant, an act that is seemingly innocuous, but when a
young black man does it to a older white woman in 1950s Mississippi, it crosses
many social and racial lines. Bryant's husband Roy, along with a friend, J.W.
Milam, came to the house of Till's Uncle Moses demanding to see Emmett. They
went into the house and took Emmett in the middle of the night, where he was
never seen alive again. His body was found days later, wrapped in barbed wire
and attached to a large industrial fan, savagely beaten until severely
disfigured, with his tongue and genitals cut off of his body.

The local law authorities in Mississippi wanted to implement a quick burial
for Till's body, but Till's mother Mamie fought this procedure and had the body
returned home to Chicago for a proper funeral service, including an open casket
for all to see how her boy was brutalized. Bryant and Milam were arrested in the
case and a murder trial was convened, but the "trail" was little more
than going through the legal motions for all involved, along with some
outrageous unsubstantiated accusations—like Mamie trying to exploit her
son for insurance money or Emmett's excessive flirting perhaps being the reason
for his death. Despite the hope that Till's family had for justice, Moses and
Mamie were constantly threatened, and Mamie's mother received threats in Chicago
too. An acquittal seemed a foregone conclusion, and after 45 minutes of
deliberation, was subsequently handed down, after the jury drank some soda and
tried to agree on how to deliver the verdict. A subsequent Grand Jury
investigation into kidnapping charges for Bryant and Milam brought no
indictment, and several months later, the two sold their story (and their
confession) to a magazine for several thousand dollars. And up until recently,
the case of the murder of Emmett Till seemed to have been closed with no
resolution or closure in sight. When Keith Beauchamp met Mamie in 1995, he vowed
to help bring her son's killers back to justice, and despite Mamie's 2003 death,
the Justice Department has reopened the case of the murder of Emmett Till, in
large part because of Beauchamp's documentary The Untold Story of Emmett
Louis Till. The film, much like Errol Morris' excellent The Thin Blue Line has inspired
action, the highest compliment a film could possibly garner.

Beauchamp does an excellent job of providing the details of the case, and at
the heart of the film (and moreover the cause) is Emmett's mother Mamie. She
presents a level of strength, courage, and determination that few could ever
fathom. She buried her son when he was young, and decided to help use the
gruesomeness of his death to her advantage. In turn, she helped inspire a
movement that was larger than anyone could have suggested. Mamie's descriptions
of seeing her son and describing the smell of his body after getting him back to
Chicago is more than anyone could realistically expect from a mother to discuss.
She does it matter of factly, perhaps to further ingrain in the viewer's mind
just how senseless her son's murder was.

When I was initially writing my opinion of the film, I wrote that if there
was something that detracted from fully appreciating the film, it was the
portrayal of Beauchamp's film as a beacon of change and influence. When compared
to Morris' film, where there was a definite set of facts portrayed quite
effectively from every point of view, Beauchamp's film didn't seem to carry some
of that same kind of effectiveness for me. I thought I had a working knowledge
of the facts of the case, but like many other people, I barely knew any part of
the story. After learning more than just a superficial view of the facts of the
case, it's clear that Beauchamp's film is just as effective. In his commentary
track, Beauchamp discusses the effort to bring the film to life, along with some
information that wasn't in the film (Mrs. Bryant had an unserved arrest warrant
at the time of Till's disappearance, and that there were possibly as many as 14
people involved in the crime), and some postscripts to the people and events in
the film. It's a superb complement to the film and is very welcome. There's a
roundtable discussion about the case and the subsequent impacts in society in
various different levels, but to make it a more complete package, I would have
provided a lot more Web and educational material on the case, as this
regrettable moment in history should have a lot more coverage attached to it now
than it does.

The film is an excellent example of powerful documentary filmmaking and
should be mandatory viewing in today's schools both for the power of one person,
along with keeping Emmett Till in the landscape of civil rights, even as history
leaves it in the rear view mirror. The Untold Story of Emmett Till is an
amazing experience.